pogrmman wrote:I support everybody getting a defense. It would be horrible to have a legal system in which this wasn't the case.

However, the defense they are using doesn't seem particularly strong here... Granted, I didn't see the event, so I don't know the full story, just what has been reported.

I agree, but what other defence could they invoke? It's clear the injuries occurred and it's clear that the police caused them; The only angle the defence team can possibly take is that the injuries were accidental. They'd be failing in their duty not to try.

They could claim it was necessary and justified self defense.

Given the injuries... That sounds terrifyingly worse.

We're in the traffic-chopper over the XKCD boards where there's been a thread-derailment. A Liquified Godwin spill has evacuated threads in a fourty-post radius of the accident, Lolcats and TVTropes have broken free of their containers. It is believed that the Point has perished.

Yeah. Given that the guy's clothes were removed and he was anally raped, claiming that doing so was 'necessary and justified' paints the officers in an even worse light than simply saying 'we didn't mean it to happen'.

pogrmman wrote:I support everybody getting a defense. It would be horrible to have a legal system in which this wasn't the case.

However, the defense they are using doesn't seem particularly strong here... Granted, I didn't see the event, so I don't know the full story, just what has been reported.

I agree, but what other defence could they invoke? It's clear the injuries occurred and it's clear that the police caused them; The only angle the defence team can possibly take is that the injuries were accidental. They'd be failing in their duty not to try.

I don't think you understand what an attorney's obligations are. An attorney of any sort has an ethical obligation not to submit any argument or defense that isn't factually or legally justifiable. This isn't widely enforced with sanctions--often, it happens because a young attorney or even an experienced one in a particularly complex area of law makes an honest mistake, and we don't want to punish that too harshly, but this also means that some (well, probably many) less honest attorneys can get away with very closely skirting the line of what is a plausible argument.

But the ethical obligations are clear. For a defense attorney, this means you're not supposed to let your client testify if you know he plans to lie, and you're not supposed to raise a defense that you know to be based on a lie, such as blaming someone else when you know your client did it. Their duty in general is not "do anything and everything possible, no matter how dishonest or illegal, to get their client off," but rather to provide the best legally and factually supportable defense possible. In the case of a client they know did something wrong, that means holding the prosecution to the very high standard of proof required by law. The prosecution must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This means proving every single element of the crime. In theory, you don't need to prove your client innocent because, according to the law, it's the burden of the state to prove that you committed the crime, and we don't believe that a random person should be forced to jump through hoops to prove that you're a good person simply because someone, somewhere got it in their head to accuse you of a crime.

I know this doesn't sound like much, but in our system it's actually a tremendous value-added. There are bad convictions all the time (by that, I mean cases the prosecution legally should not have won, and not necessarily cases where the convicted person was actually innocent.) When you have a PD handling a few hundred cases a year, he might not notice that the prosecution hasn't actually provided evidence supporting their claim that a certain aspect of the crime happened, or do a great job pointing out that the shaky case was far short of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. There are even appellate cases where a conviction was overturned, not because the crime was later found unconstitutional or the police did something wrong, but because a panel of judges looked at the evidence and concluded that, even if you assume take all of the prosecution's evidence to be 100% credible, it still didn't add up to a crime. Juries are human--sometimes they convict people because they're tired and want to go home, they can't get past their own biases and preconceived notions, or they don't really understand the law the trial is based on. Sometimes, they simply don't like the defendant. A good, honest defense attorney's job is to get the jury past any issues that would prevent them from giving the defendant a fair trial, and then do everything they can to convince them that in a fair trial, the government has fallen short.

Netreker0 wrote:I don't think you understand what an attorney's obligations are. An attorney of any sort has an ethical obligation not to submit any argument or defense that isn't factually or legally justifiable.

If the jury buys the argument, then by definition it was factually and legally justifiable. You are putting the cart before the horse here in attempting to pre-judge.

But the ethical obligations are clear. For a defense attorney, this means you're not supposed to let your client testify if you know he plans to lie, and you're not supposed to raise a defense that you know to be based on a lie, such as blaming someone else when you know your client did it.

Their duty in general is not "do anything and everything possible, no matter how dishonest or illegal, to get their client off,"

Therefore I'd assume that they don't know it to be based on a lie.

The defence team could of course be acting dishonestly or illegally - just as anyone, anywhere, at any time could be - but I (unlike you?) am presuming them innocent until proven guilty on this front.

elasto wrote:If the jury buys the argument, then by definition it was factually and legally justifiable.

Uh.... no. That's like saying that if the electorate votes in a blundering racist misogynistic egocentric factually challenged misspeller, that the resulting hairdo is by definition factually and legally Tremendous as the Leader of the once Free World.

If the jury buys it, then that is the decision. That doesn't make it justifiable. It just makes it over with.

Jose

Order of the Sillies, Honoris Causam - bestowed by charlie_grumbles on NP 859 * OTTscar winner: Wordsmith - bestowed by yappobiscuts and the OTT on NP 1832 * Ecclesiastical Calendar of the Order of the Holy Contradiction * Please help addams if you can. She needs all of us.

Netreker0 wrote:I don't think you understand what an attorney's obligations are. An attorney of any sort has an ethical obligation not to submit any argument or defense that isn't factually or legally justifiable. This isn't widely enforced with sanctions--often, it happens because a young attorney or even an experienced one in a particularly complex area of law makes an honest mistake, and we don't want to punish that too harshly, but this also means that some (well, probably many) less honest attorneys can get away with very closely skirting the line of what is a plausible argument.

I'm pretty sure that if this was done via the testimony of the defendants (I don't see how else it would have been introduced) and they want to give the testimony, this is actually a really tricky legal scenario with no clear answer. To report on the defendant would violate confidentiality rules and to refuse to present the defense would violate either the defendants right to a lawyer or their right to testify in their own defense. I don't know about you but I really don't want to live under a legal structure where any of those protections can be thrown out so I'll take the bad with the good.

On Wednesday, WSVN aired a cell phone video reportedly taken moments before caregiver Charles Kinsey was shot by North Miami police. In it, Kinsey, who survived, can be see lying on the ground with his hands raised, explaining that him and the autistic man he was assisting are unarmed.

Jonathon Aledda, a four-year veteran of the department, faces charges of attempted manslaughter, a third-degree felony, and culpable negligence, a first-degree misdemeanor, according to the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office.

gmalivuk wrote:

King Author wrote:If space (rather, distance) is an illusion, it'd be possible for one meta-me to experience both body's sensory inputs.

Yes. And if wishes were horses, wishing wells would fill up very quickly with drowned horses.

Not surprising, but what the hell? What kind of evidence does it take to find a policeman guilty? It seems Philandro did everything he was supposed to do (or what apologists say POC should do when dealing with cops), and yet was still killed in front of his fiancee and four year old kid, after being pulled over on a routine traffic stop.

Belial wrote:I am not even in the same country code as "the mood for this shit."

Thesh wrote:The only way they could possibly be found guilty is if they could prove premeditation.

No, the defense was demanding that the officer be given some deference because of the drugs and the speed of the killing. The jury agreed with that, but it doesn't rule out a civil case. ( Civil cases only need more likely than not compared to beyond a reasonable doubt)

Thesh wrote:The only way they could possibly be found guilty is if they could prove premeditation.

No, the defense was demanding that the officer be given some deference because of the drugs and the speed of the killing. The jury agreed with that, but it doesn't rule out a civil case. ( Civil cases only need more likely than not compared to beyond a reasonable doubt)

I know I should go track that down in it's proper context, but what the hell? The speed of the killing?

Like, 'it's not my fault, I killed him so fast I couldn't possibly have had time to think things through"?

More and more, I'm thinking that police officers should stop being trained to reach for their gun first, and instead have the taser be the primary weapon, but fired about as often as they currently fire guns rather than being a 'when all you have is a hammer' sort of thing.

Thesh wrote:The only way they could possibly be found guilty is if they could prove premeditation.

No, the defense was demanding that the officer be given some deference because of the drugs and the speed of the killing. The jury agreed with that, but it doesn't rule out a civil case. ( Civil cases only need more likely than not compared to beyond a reasonable doubt)

Civil suits only penalize the taxpayers; the officer is generally immune from civil penalties if what they did was part of their dties.

Since Mr. Yanez was found not guilty, he will almost certainly be ruled immune.

CorruptUser wrote:More and more, I'm thinking that police officers should stop being trained to reach for their gun first, and instead have the taser be the primary weapon, but fired about as often as they currently fire guns rather than being a 'when all you have is a hammer' sort of thing.

I imagine the fear is that cops might just default on tasers more often, for situations that don't really require use of force. Presumably, the taser being less likely to kill could mean that there's less of a stigma against its use (and abuse) over something like a pistol. Of course, tasers aren't guaranteed less than lethal, so more casual uses could mean more deaths from cardiac arrest. (This is the same argument against "shoot them in the leg" ideas.)

Tasers are also a lot less reliable in stopping people, too. So I doubt police unions will let such a change go unopposed.

Go to St. Augustine, he was told, to reinvestigate the death of 24-year-old Michelle O’Connell, shot while packing to leave her deputy sheriff boyfriend, Jeremy Banks. The fatal bullet came from his service weapon.Agent Rodgers had been summoned here twice before to answer questions about cases involving the St. Johns County sheriff, David B. Shoar — examining whether his officers had drawn their guns and used pepper spray to break up a peaceful graduation party in an African-American neighborhood (they had), and whether a political supporter of the sheriff had engaged in improper conduct with minors (he hadn’t).This time, the stakes were higher. There was a dead body — a single mother of a 4-year-old girl — and the sheriff’s office had chosen to investigate its own deputy, poorly as it turned out. Because detectives quickly concluded that Ms. O’Connell had taken her own life, they had done little investigating.Now, with crucial evidence missing or unexamined, Agent Rodgers had to make sense of the mess. And that meant possibly antagonizing one of Florida’s most powerful sheriffs. A mercurial leader, unctuous one moment, bitingly critical the next, Sheriff Shoar didn’t countenance challenges to his authority. He had resisted the O’Connell family’s demands for an outside review of the case for nearly five months.When the sheriff finally agreed, his office had one requirement — that Agent Rodgers, and only Agent Rodgers, conduct the investigation, according to Steve Donaway, a former supervisor with the state investigative agency. (The sheriff disputes that.)It took the agent only two weeks to find evidence that fundamentally changed the complexion of the case. Two neighbors told him that they had heard cries for help on the night of the shooting, prompting the medical examiner to change his ruling from suicide to “shot by another.” As the investigation moved toward homicide, the local state attorney suddenly recused himself, prompting the governor to appoint a special prosecutor.But the medical examiner changed his mind yet again, and the special prosecutor, citing insufficient evidence, closed the case without bringing charges. And for a year, that’s where the case stood — closed if not forgotten.Then, in 2013, I flew to St. Augustine and asked the sheriff for files related to the shooting. I came to write about the O’Connell case as part of an examination, in collaboration with the PBS public affairs program “Frontline,” of how the police investigate domestic violence allegations in their ranks.My record request was routine, but Sheriff Shoar didn’t view it that way. In his world, an out-of-town reporter “poking around” a closed case “kind of stunk,” he said, and he alerted prosecutors so they wouldn’t be caught off guard. But when the sheriff learned that I had already asked Agent Rodgers’s supervisor for an interview, and that he had not been notified, the sheriff erupted, suspecting, incorrectly, that the agency was behind my visit.

TLDR Sheriff controls town with iron fist and patronage jobs. All the sheriff's deputies have a history of domestic violence, and there was a report of a suicide with a deputy's wife. The suicide turns out is a coverup for a deputy murdering his wife. The sheriff orders everything covered up, and then the special agent investigating the sheriff's office to be investigated and fired.

It's a long convulted story, and most of it is just coverups, intimidation, and bribery. Basic example,

For the O’Connells, the grief has been compounded by the sheriff’s embrace of one of their own — Michelle’s brother Scott. Mr. O’Connell was fired from the sheriff’s office for losing his temper after learning there would be no charges in his sister’s death. But Scott was rehired after he concluded that Agent Rodgers manipulated the family into believing that Ms. O’Connell had been murdered.Patty O’Connell, who now cares for Ms. O’Connell’s 10-year-old daughter, Alexis, wants nothing to do with her son Scott. “There cannot be forgiveness until he says he is sorry for lying about Michelle,” she said. “I know it must eat at his conscience.”Scott O’Connell did not return a message seeking comment.The two local medical examiners who sided with Sheriff Shoar experienced their own setbacks in March, when the Florida Medical Examiners Commission accused them of violating state rules in their handling of the O’Connell case.

So yea, this is what happens when law enforcement gets sizable power over a community. You get a bunch of thugs covering up their own crimes and then trying to get everyone corrupted too. The town is deeply divided, most of the ones who matter still think the sheriff's office is innocent. I found this man's statement very appropriate.

Chief Hardwick criticized parts of Agent Rodgers’s inquiry, but in an interview with F.D.L.E. investigators, he called the sheriff’s 152-page report “a biased opinion.”“I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I’m tainted. Everybody’s tainted. The media’s tainted us. The conversations among cops that are local has tainted us.”What happened, he said, is not fair to anybody. But, he added, “that’s just the way it is.”

The Officer Yanez case; after Castile was killed, his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds made and posted a video of the aftermath. As part of their "investigation", the cops sent a warrant to Facebook for, well, everything about Ms. Reynolds. As if something she did would prove the killing of Castile was justified.

Spoiler:

To "win" at killing citizens, you must start the spin immediately. Yanez spun his own, speaking to a lawyer less than two hours after killing Castile. Local law enforcement did the same thing. Documents obtained by Tony Webster show Special Agent Bill O'Donnell issued a warrant to Facebook for "all information retained" by the company on Diamond Reynolds, Castile's girlfriend. This was to include all email sent or received by that account, as well as "chat logs," which presumably means the content of private messages. The warrant also demands any communications that may have been deleted by Reynolds, as well as metadata on photos or videos uploaded to Facebook. It came accompanied with an indefinite gag order.

CorruptUser wrote:More and more, I'm thinking that police officers should stop being trained to reach for their gun first, and instead have the taser be the primary weapon, but fired about as often as they currently fire guns rather than being a 'when all you have is a hammer' sort of thing.

I imagine the fear is that cops might just default on tasers more often, for situations that don't really require use of force. Presumably, the taser being less likely to kill could mean that there's less of a stigma against its use (and abuse) over something like a pistol. Of course, tasers aren't guaranteed less than lethal, so more casual uses could mean more deaths from cardiac arrest. (This is the same argument against "shoot them in the leg" ideas.)

Tasers are also a lot less reliable in stopping people, too. So I doubt police unions will let such a change go unopposed.

Also up for discussion, sources say, is the introduction of more specially trained armed officers in cars, and offering handguns to some patrol officers as well as the idea that all frontline officers could be offered training to carry a gun.

One option in the paper for getting armed officers more quickly to the scene of an attack is for officers to be offered a sidearm, like officers in the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).

In a recent survey of Met officers, the Metropolitan Police Federation found just over half said they would carry a gun routinely if asked to do so. One in 10 said they would quit rather than carry a firearm.

More than 200 police officers in Germany have been sent home for bad behaviour, after throwing a wild party that included a couple having sex in public, men urinating in the open, and an officer performing a striptease and dancing with her gun.

The officers in question were on secondment from the Berlin police to help with security at next week’s G20 summit in Hamburg which will bring Theresa May and Angela Merkel together with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

More than 20,000 officers are being drafted into the city, with reserved coming from as far away as Austria and the Netherlands. But the Berlin contingent have been sent home in disgrace after staging a party that seems to have shocked their colleagues.

A spokesman for the Berlin police defended the officers, saying they were “only human”.

And one of the officers involved in the party told Bild newspaper he didn’t see what all the fuss was about, because it was just a “normal night for Berlin”.

The German capital prides itself on being a party city. But the policeman’s ball staged in Hamburg appears to have been a wild night even by Berlin standards.

The police reportedly got bored with the lack of television at their makeshift accommodation in converted shipping containers, and decided to stage their own entertainment.FAQ | G20

What ensued reportedly included officers watching as two of their number had sex on top of a security fence, a female officer performing an exotic dance in her bathrobe, using her gun as a prop, and several male officers standing in a row and urinating together in public.

The music went on until 6.30am.

Colleagues from another German police force, North Rhine-Westphalia, shared the Berlin officers' accommodation but did not join the party.

When they came to complain about the noise at 3.30am, a fight reportedly ensued.

The night of excess may have played into the Berlin mythology, but it has come as something of an embarrassment to the city’s police.

“Good behaviour is important for police officers,” Thomas Neuendorf, a spokesman for the Berlin force, told German television.

“To put it plainly, you cannot party like crazy and f*** in public.

“We are talking about heavy drinking in their free time before an assignment and these are not 16-year-olds on a school trip. We do not have all the details yet but there are pictures and we have asked for statements. There will be consequences.”

The police reportedly got bored with the lack of television at their makeshift accommodation in converted shipping containers, and decided to stage their own entertainment.

I'm assuming that sounds much worse than it actually is, right? Like "coverted shipping containers" were actually completely made up to be accommodations, rather than say throwing some lighting and a bed into an actual shipping container?

Justine Damond’s death helped draw more upper middle class white residents into street protests. And what was happening in Minneapolis, in terms of the case uniting a broad spectrum of people, was also true nationally, as Shaun King, a well-established writer and researcher on police brutality, noted in a recent New York Daily News column, “The preponderance of conservatives and liberals alike all agree that the shooting of Justine Damond was wrong. That’s rarely happened before.”

But as King goes on to explain, the unusually widespread agreement could not be explained by just the details of the case, because there was a long list of unarmed black people being shot by police under clear-cut circumstances of innocence. King’s suggestion, that the fact Damond was a white woman was part of why many people saw the case differently, is a widely held belief.

Am I reading this right? A police officer, wearing a body camera that he presumably knows is on, openly commits a crime by planting drugs on a suspect, and expects to get away with it? Besides the corruption, the officer should be fired for stupidity.

Jose

Order of the Sillies, Honoris Causam - bestowed by charlie_grumbles on NP 859 * OTTscar winner: Wordsmith - bestowed by yappobiscuts and the OTT on NP 1832 * Ecclesiastical Calendar of the Order of the Holy Contradiction * Please help addams if you can. She needs all of us.

Netreker0 wrote:I don't think you understand what an attorney's obligations are. An attorney of any sort has an ethical obligation not to submit any argument or defense that isn't factually or legally justifiable. This isn't widely enforced with sanctions--often, it happens because a young attorney or even an experienced one in a particularly complex area of law makes an honest mistake, and we don't want to punish that too harshly, but this also means that some (well, probably many) less honest attorneys can get away with very closely skirting the line of what is a plausible argument.

I'm pretty sure that if this was done via the testimony of the defendants (I don't see how else it would have been introduced) and they want to give the testimony, this is actually a really tricky legal scenario with no clear answer. To report on the defendant would violate confidentiality rules and to refuse to present the defense would violate either the defendants right to a lawyer or their right to testify in their own defense. I don't know about you but I really don't want to live under a legal structure where any of those protections can be thrown out so I'll take the bad with the good.

Sorry for the ridiculously late reply. Just wondering, how old is that journal article? I didn't notice a single citation more recent than the late 70's.

I can't speak for federal practice, and you're right to point out that I probably extrapolated my own experiences more than is justified. I reside in a state that has largely accepted that premeditated perjury falls under the crime-fraud exception that would allow the attorney to break confidentiality, but the extent to which there is a ethical duty to do so is unclear. I know of one (civil) case where fees were awarded under our version of Rule 11 because the attorney knowingly allowed a client to commit perjury, but the circumstances were a bit extreme and, as I understand it, it was a bit of a lark that the other attorney was able to catch it.

elasto wrote:

Netreker0 wrote:I don't think you understand what an attorney's obligations are. An attorney of any sort has an ethical obligation not to submit any argument or defense that isn't factually or legally justifiable.

If the jury buys the argument, then by definition it was factually and legally justifiable. You are putting the cart before the horse here in attempting to pre-judge.

Actually, this isn't true. This may come as a surprise to you, but cases are overturned on appeal not only for arcane procedural defects, but because the appellate courts decide that the jury was, in fact, wrong to buy the argument. I'm most familiar with this happening in defamation cases. As a matter of law, truth is an absolute defense for defamation. In other words, if I say something about you that makes you look bad, it's only defamation if what I said was untrue. There have been cases where the jury found that the defendant defamed the plaintiff, despite the fact that the plaintiff actually testified that what the defendant said was true. (Somehow, the defendant's attorney was asleep at the wheel and didn't move for summary judgment at this point.) The jury ruled in favor the the plaintiff despite the fact that it was completely unsupported as a matter of law, and on appealed it's overturned because the jury was dead wrong.

Even the presiding judge in the original court can render a judgment notwithstanding the verdict because he believes that no reasonable jury could have made the decision his jury made.

Actually, this might help you to understand what "legally justifiable" actually means: Every crime is comprised of elements. For example, burglary in some states means 1) breaking in to 2) a house or residential building 3) in order to commit a felony. If the prosecutor argues that Bob broke into an abandoned car because he wanted to commit felonious abuse of a chicken in there, that is a legally insufficient argument to support the charge of burglary. It's not "putting the cart before the horse," or "prejudging," it's simply acknowledging that even a moron should be able to see that the prosecution didn't even try to argue the second element of the crime. Even if we take everything the prosecution is trying to argue to be 100% true, as a matter of law Bob did not commit a burglary under this particular law.

Am I reading this right? A police officer, wearing a body camera that he presumably knows is on, openly commits a crime by planting drugs on a suspect, and expects to get away with it? Besides the corruption, the officer should be fired for stupidity.

"What we think we see, and if you slow down the video especially in the first five seconds, the officer appearing to place a red can underneath some trash, push the fence up, and hide it," said public defender Debbie Katz Levi.

The footage was caught on camera in January, but not discovered by a public defender in Levi's office until this month.

Levi says the alleged act of planting drugs was caught because Baltimore police body cameras capture the 30 seconds before an officer actually hits the record button, but without audio.

When the sound does kick in, "he then walks down the alley and miraculously goes to the same space where he appeared to have just planted the can with the suspected narcotics," Levi said.

ObsessoMom wrote:I guess he hadn't known that. They all sure know it now.

This is why I'm a big fan of making it mandatory to keep those cameras on all the time while off duty, and to impose stiff penalties for non-compliance. The actual details of implementation would obviously have to consider fairness to the officers. Ideally, I'd say redundant cameras with fully redundant recording systems, a means for the officer to check in real time if either of those redundant systems failed, with penalties imposed only if the officer allows both systems to remain offline for a certain period of time.

Not only would this system be a boon to the cause of accountability, it would also benefit officers themselves. In the recent spate of ambush killings, the officers who were killed wouldn't have had enough warning to turn on their cameras. However, a camera that is always on and regularly uploading footage could provide valuable information if an officer is caught off guard and killed or rendered unconscious.

Netreker0 wrote:Actually, this isn't true. This may come as a surprise to you, but cases are overturned on appeal not only for arcane procedural defects, but because the appellate courts decide that the jury was, in fact, wrong to buy the argument.

...

The jury ruled in favor the the plaintiff despite the fact that it was completely unsupported as a matter of law, and on appealed it's overturned because the jury was dead wrong.

None-the-less, Jury Nullification remains an important check-and-balance in the legal system - whereby a jury can and sometimes should render a judgement which is not 'legally justified' in a strictly rational sense, to serve the greater good.

In criminal cases in particular, double-jeopardy usually protects the defendant once a not-guilty verdict has been issued - no matter what the legal basis was (if any) that led the jury to their decision. It's in that sense that I mean a jury is the ultimate arbiter of what the law is, and therefore whether a particular line of defence was legally justified.

(In general, Jury Nullification seems more suspect in civil cases (where there is a winner and a loser) than in criminal cases (where there is essentially just a loser)).

Are you tired of paying out to moochers that you falsely imprisoned? Don't you wish those fines would somehow go away? With this one trick, all false imprisonment charges will expire. http://www.npr.org/2017/08/01/540903038 ... eals-courtAll you need to do is hold him extra long. Is the statue of limitations 2 years? Hold him for three and say you were backlogged. *

*This guy wasn't the cream of the crop, or educated, or had any money. But then again that's exactly why we have these protections in the first place. The obvious answer is to increase the statue of limitations, but that doesn't stop ICE from simply jailing them longer. After all, he looks like an illegal, especially a Hispanic illegal.

elasto wrote:None-the-less, Jury Nullification remains an important check-and-balance in the legal system - whereby a jury can and sometimes should render a judgement which is not 'legally justified' in a strictly rational sense, to serve the greater good.

I'm afraid this once again betrays a lack of understand of what "legally justified" means. Jury nullification refers to one thing and one thing only--a not guilty verdict. A not guilty verdict does not mean innocent. It only means that the state failed to meet its very stringent standard of proof to demonstrate guilt. This can never be legally unjustified. The prosecution has the burden to make specific legal assertions, supported by specific factual assertions, supported by evidence. For the prosecution to prevail, the jury has to believe that their factual assertions form all the required elements of their legal assertion (legally justified), and that their evidence is credible enough to prove all of those factual assertions beyond a reasonable doubt (factually justified.) For the defense to prevail, it doesn't have to make a single factual assertion. It doesn't have to make a single legal assertion. It other words, it doesn't have to proffer anything that might be considered frivolous or unjustified. The defense can immediately rest without saying a word, and they can still win so long as the jury doesn't buy the prosecution's case.

Similarly, there is no way for a not guilty verdict to be based on findings of fact that are not factually supported. There is legal precedent that provides a basis for when a judge can say it was unreasonable for the jury to conclude that something was proven. For example, if the only evidence someone ran out of a bank was hearsay that the jury was instructed to ignore after an objection, and the jury still made a ruling that requires proving that the guy ran out of the bank, that is factually unsupported. However, there is no basis for the judge to say, "You absolutely have to take this evidence to prove this assertion beyond a reasonable doubt." Even if the state provides a tape of a guy robbing a bank, being stopped by police, admitting to them he robbed the bank, and then writing and signing a confession, as a matter of law it's perfectly reasonable for the jury to conclude this piece of evidence doesn't prove anything.

phlip wrote:The idea that the statute of limitations can expire while the crime is still in progress is baffling to me.

Generally speaking, it can't. The statute of limitations only begins to toll once the crime ends. I'm guessing the way they game the system is by treating the wrongful arrest/prosecution itself as the crime and writing it into the law somewhere that the actual detention itself is considered legal so long as it was being done on the basis of a seemingly legitimate arrest (regardless of whether that legitimacy is later disputed.) It is possible that they wrote this specific law to go against the general rules for criminal statutes, but that would draw a lot of bad attention immediately. Civil trials can be slightly weirder--they have continuous statutes of limitations that might mean, for example, you can sue for something that's been happening for years, but you can't collected damages for the parts that happened before the SoL cutoff.

Unfortunately, when it comes to crimes committed by the government, things go increasingly into the grey area. Increasingly the law will specifically state that when a state actor is accused of something that would normally be a crime, they are actually taken out of the normal criminal justice system, and instead dealt with through an administrative court or some quasi-civil procedure, or some other system that doesn't follow the norms of a criminal court.

Netreker0 wrote:Jury nullification refers to one thing and one thing only--a not guilty verdict. A not guilty verdict does not mean innocent. It only means that the state failed to meet its very stringent standard of proof to demonstrate guilt. This can never be legally unjustified. The prosecution has the burden to make specific legal assertions, supported by specific factual assertions, supported by evidence. For the prosecution to prevail, the jury has to believe that their factual assertions form all the required elements of their legal assertion (legally justified), and that their evidence is credible enough to prove all of those factual assertions beyond a reasonable doubt (factually justified.)

I may be wrong about this, so this is more in the nature of a question that I'm wondering if you were able to clarify for me. Does jury nullification refer to the specific scenario where a jury is indeed convinced that the prosecutions case is both legally and factually justified beyond reasonable doubt (therefore they "should", as instructed, render a guilty verdict), but the jury nevertheless chooses to return a not guilty verdict for other reasons, which may be totally unrelated to the merits of the case (for example, a belief that the law itself is unjust)?

That was my understanding of it, but your explanation has made me less sure, so I thought I'd ask.

What Juries are doing is picking sides, deciding when behavior is criminal and when it isn't. So if the juries believe that a behavior isn't criminal, irrespective of the law, they can choose not to convict. The downside is that it can just as easily go the other way. This of course is in my reality. Yours may vary. The Wikipedia entry is interesting. This particular entry is hysterical.

In 2017, the Ninth Circuit upheld the first three sentences of the jury's instruction and overruled the second half. The jury instructions were: "You cannot substitute your sense of justice, whatever that means, for your duty to follow the law, whether you agree with it or not. It is not for you to determine whether the law is just or whether the law is unjust. That cannot be your task. There is no such thing as valid jury nullification. You would violate your oath and the law if you willfully brought a verdict contrary to the law given to you in this case." However, they deemed this a harmless error and affirmed the conviction.[43]

Netreker0 wrote:Jury nullification refers to one thing and one thing only--a not guilty verdict. A not guilty verdict does not mean innocent. It only means that the state failed to meet its very stringent standard of proof to demonstrate guilt. This can never be legally unjustified. The prosecution has the burden to make specific legal assertions, supported by specific factual assertions, supported by evidence. For the prosecution to prevail, the jury has to believe that their factual assertions form all the required elements of their legal assertion (legally justified), and that their evidence is credible enough to prove all of those factual assertions beyond a reasonable doubt (factually justified.)

I may be wrong about this, so this is more in the nature of a question that I'm wondering if you were able to clarify for me. Does jury nullification refer to the specific scenario where a jury is indeed convinced that the prosecutions case is both legally and factually justified beyond reasonable doubt (therefore they "should", as instructed, render a guilty verdict), but the jury nevertheless chooses to return a not guilty verdict for other reasons, which may be totally unrelated to the merits of the case (for example, a belief that the law itself is unjust)?

You have it right. One thing to keep in mind is that, in legal drafting, "should" is aspirational, in contrast to "must," which is imperative. I know it's a fine hair, but this means that the jury instructions are simply recommending a course of action, and not imposing any sort of legal requirement or moral duty. The government has a strange relationship with jury nullification where it really tries to avoid explicitly endorsing it as a valid thing, but it also generally isn't okay for anyone (the judge, the prosecutor) to explicitly instruct a jury that jury nullification is forbidden. Of course, in practice, there really is no way to police jury nullification without abolishing the norm of sealed jury deliberations--a jury can always hide behind the excuse that they feel you didn't quite meet the burden of proof on the facts, and nobody but the other jurors and God could really say if they're lying.